Technology

Internet of Things & Sensors

GAIA utilizes combined energy metering data gathering and management services and provide advanced data analytics, user and building profiling, recommendation and optimization services constructing an energy efficiency IoT service ecosystem. On top of this ecosystem, a set of applications for different end-user groups and use case scenarios is being developed. GAIA uses indoor IoT infrastructure installed across a large number of educational buildings that allow for continual monitoring of energy consumption, motion/activity and environmental parameters (quality of air, temperature, noise, etc.). Both services and applications will be flexible and customizable enough, in order to operate in a wide range of contexts and levels: climatic, social and educational.

Cloud Technologies – IoT Data Management & Analytics

GAIA utilizes existing cloud technologies for centralized or distributed real-time data analytics, in order to be integrated in the existing platforms of the consortium, for the analysis and profiling of energy consumption data of school buildings. Sensorflare, provided by SparkWorks, is a data storage and brokerage service system for IoT, already deployed and supporting the operation of a number of public school infrastructures in Greece. According to requirements created by the GAIA applications and services, GAIA is currently implementing solutions tailored to energy efficiency in schools buildings.

A Building Manager Application provides access to all IoT data produced by the GAIA infrastructure.

A social networking application is also utilized to cover the respective needs.

Gamification – Serious Games

GAIA has developed a system that reads in data from the IoT sensors of the buildings, as well as data from participatory sensing, and uses this information to track how much energy has been saved over time. The game aims to:

keep the students engaged with GAIA,

enhance the learning process and combine it with participatory sensing activities,

help them to change the way their educational building uses energy.

The ovos play Gamified Learning System is a technical framework for implementing serious games, including modules that enable multi-client capabilities, quiz pools, exams. The complementing ovos play Game Designer allows to build interactive, nonlinear and multi-branched learning scenarios. Based on such software components, along with the rest of the GAIA ecosystem, we have developed the GAIA Challenge, available at http://gaia-challenge.com/

Open Source Hardware & Software, Datasets

The GAIA consortium follows an open source philosophy, wherever possible. We are strong supporters of the open source movement, having already open-sourced many of our results. The same goes for hardware used in the implemented solutions; it will either be based on commercial products and any extensions will be open sourced, or it will follow a completely open source approach (e.g., based on the Arduino hardware ecosystem). The official GitHub repository of the project can be found on:

The consortium also recognizes the importance of open access to datasets produced by research projects, and not just research publications. Datasets produced during throughout GAIA will be soon made publicly available, after first being processed to ensure privacy and anonymity.